Frightening news from claudio: It's back! With a vengenance! It's got the Star Generator, and it's probably trashing Mega-Tokyo (no, not Megatokyo) right now!
It's definitely great to see this project (one of the original motivations for starting FreeSCI) resurrected. However, the URL would appear to be slightly different than indicated in the original post- the other project referenced looks interesting, too, though...
I still think the new FreeSCI gfx subsystem (which desparately needs a name!) can be strapped onto Sarien. It'd probably add some overhead, but it would allow Sarien to take advantage of all of FreeSCI's graphics drivers, such as GGI, and... uh... the Xlib driver... and... the partially implemented SDL driver.... OK, still, there might be some benefits, such as trilinear filtering, or maybe some performance improvements on system with more memory. Or maybe not. But it'd be something I should try eventually...
FreeSCI
/dev/sequencer doesn't like me. Somehow, we run out of
partials (voices) much too soon, even though a sufficient
number of note-offs (MIDI 8x... or was that 9x?) are
sent. Also, far too many gfx optimizations appear to be
hitting worst-case situations (especially noticeable in the
HQ character setup screen). Don't like that at all.
A few interesting suggestions regarding extending SCI have
been suggested on the IRC channel, mostly regarding BSD
socket support. Personally, I think a more interesting
challenge would be to extend the interpreter to have 32 bit
support without breaking the existing 16 bit code. Anyway,
general interest in using SCI for new stuff
bodes well regarding Brian Provinciano's SCI development thingy.
Don't think I'd want to use a 16 bit interpreter for a new
project, though...
Interpreters and virtual machines
I got an interesting mail from someone who slightly
mis-judged the order of magnitude of FreeSCI and wanted to
pit it against Java and .NET. He was rather persistant with
this, especially since, as he pointed out, a proprietary VM
called ICVM
was much faster than Java on his system. From what I can
tell, ICVM looks like a more register-based approach (like
Dis)
with a highly CISC instruction set. Due to the CISCness, the
interpreter overhead was supposed to be rather small, making
a JIT unneccessary.
However, the design of ICVM looks
rather PC-centric- most of its registers are 32 bit, and it
only has 6 general purpose integer and 3 general purpose
floating point registers (On most architectures, you could
play Space War in the remaning registers without this
noticeably affecting performance...).
Anyway, the main point he was making was that there ought to
be a free VM design around. Creating a good real-life VM
would certainly be an interesting challenge, but I'm not
sure whether it'd help Free Software in general- after all,
it would just encourage people to keep their stuff closed
again.
Then again, it might help making non-mainstream platforms
more popular, which might turn out to affect the BSDs and
GNU/Linux positively... Of course, the amount of work needed
to create something in the order of manitude of Java would
be immense. A more sane starting point would probably be to
start off an existing project (such as Python) and use its
libraries, tweak its VM for performance, and write a gcc
backend for it...
Well, I guess I'm spending too much time thinking about
this- a project of this kind couldn't happen without massive
interest from a group of powerful hackers, and I don't think
we'll see that.
Exult
Looks like Exult will be going into Debian's contrib. IMHO
that's pretty good news, but I'm not certain whether the
auto-built Alpha port will work well (since they're probably
building it with gcc rather than cxx).
Anime
Watched the first ten episodes of Cowboy Bebop for the third
time (with a constantly increasing audience). I do have the
third DVD lying around here, but, not having a DVD player
myself, I'll have to wait for other people to have some
spare time in order to finally learn what happens after
Ganymede Elegy...
Mononoke Hime is going to be shown in our local
theaters RSN. Only two more weeks or so...